Brilliant, Troubled Dorothy Parker | by Robert Gottlieb | The New York Review of Books Brilliant, Troubled Dorothy Parker edited by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick iUniverse, 483 pp., $34.95 (paper) by Dorothy Parker, edited by Colleen Breese, with an introduction by Regina Barreca Penguin, 447 pp., $18.00 (paper) by Dorothy Parker, edited by Marion Meade Penguin, 390 pp., $18.00 (paper) edited and with an introduction by Marion Meade Penguin, 626 pp., $20.00 (paper) Simon and Schuster, 318 pp. (1970) Jacob Lofman/Condé Nast Archive/Corbis Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell at their farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 1937 What are we to make today of this famous woman who, beginning almost a century ago, has fascinated generations with her wit, flair, talent, and near genius for self-destruction?

For some, what registers most strongly is her central role in the legend of the Algonquin Round Table, with its campiness of wisecracks, quips, and put-downs—a part of her life she would come to repudiate. For others, it’s the descent into alcoholism, and the sad final years holed up in Manhattan’s Volney Hotel. Pick your myth. As for her writing, it has evoked ridiculous exaggeration from her votaries, both her contemporaries and her biographers. Vincent Sheean: “Among contemporary artists, I would put her next to Hemingway and Bill Faulkner. She wasn’t Shakespeare, but what she was, was true.” John Keats in his biography of her, You Might as Well Live (1970): “She wrote poetry that was at least as good as the best of Millay and Housman. She wrote some stories that are easily as good as some of O’Hara and Hemingway.” This is praise that manages to be inflated and qualified at the same time.

And here is Regina Barreca, a professor of English literature and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, in her introduction to the Penguin edition of the Complete Stories: “If Parker’s work can be dismissed as narrow and easy, then so can the work of Austen, Eliot, and Woolf.” Well, no. Exaggerated claims don’t strengthen the case for Parker’s literary accomplishments. As is inevitably the case with criticism grounded in agenda, they diminish it. But this doesn’t mean that her work is without value or interest. Certainly she struck a chord with the public: from the start, her voice spoke to a wide range of readers. Her generally sardonic, often angry, occasionally brutal view of men and women—of love and marriage, of cauterized despair—triggered recognition and perhaps even strengthened resolve. She told the truth as she perceived it, while using her wit and humor to hold at arm’s length the feelings that her personal experiences had unleashed in her. An uncanny modern descendant is Nora Ephron in her novel Heartburn, which reimagines her ugly and painful breakup with Carl Bernstein as a barbed comedy.

In 1915, Parker, aged twenty-two, went to work at Vogue (for ten dollars a week), writing captions, proofreading, fact-checking, etc., and after a while moved over to the very young Vanity Fair; her first poem to be published had recently appeared there. She happily functioned as a kind of scribe-of-all-work until three years later she was chosen to replace the departing P.G. Wodehouse as the magazine’s drama critic. She was not only the youngest by far of New York’s theater critics, she was the only female one. It was at the magazine that she met the lovable and sympathetic Robert Benchley, who would become the closest friend of her life, as well as Robert Sherwood, long before his four Pulitzer Prizes (three for drama, one for biography). They became a threesome, and started eating lunch together at the nearby Algonquin Hotel because it was affordable and the food was okay. At about the same time, another threesome drifted in, graduates of Stars and Stripes, the overseas army’s weekly newspaper. They were Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, and Franklin Pierce Adams, who as “F.P.A.” was the most influential newspaper columnist of the day.

Soon Adams was quoting Parker’s Vanity Fair verses and, even more effectively, her bon mots. Quickly “Dorothy Parker” was a celebrity. It didn’t hurt that she was very pretty, very sexy, and had a somewhat checkered personal life. She had married a good-looking, not very interesting (to others) young WASP businessman named Edwin Parker—she liked to say she did it in order to legitimately shed her maiden name of Rothschild (no, not the Rothschilds). He went into the army in 1917, and she followed him around army bases in the States, but when he came back from overseas, it was over; apart from anything else, he had become seriously addicted to morphine. Many amours followed, all of them disastrous and all of them feeding her eternal presentation of herself in her prose and poetry as wounded, heartsick, embittered, soul-weary. Along the way, she had a legal but frightening abortion (she had put it off too long), the father being the charming, womanizing Charles MacArthur, who would go on to cowrite The Front Page and marry Helen Hayes. Parker was crazy about him; his interest waned.

The gossip was that when he contributed thirty dollars toward the abortion, she remarked that it was like Judas making a refund. In 1920 Vanity Fair fired her at the insistence of several important Broadway producers whom her caustic reviews had managed to offend. (Benchley immediately resigned in solidarity with her; Sherwood had already been fired.) Another literary magazine, Ainslee’s, with a far larger readership, took her up and gave her a free hand, and she went on laying waste to the tidal wave of meretricious plays and musicals and revues that opened every year, sometimes ten a week; one Christmas night there were eight premieres. Yet—always just, if not always kind—she recognized and saluted real achievement when she actually came upon it.

Meanwhile, her verses and stories were appearing profusely and everywhere: not only in upscale places like Vanity Fair (which was happier to publish her than employ her), The Smart Set, and The American Mercury, but also in the popular Ladies’ Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Life (when it was still a comic magazine), and—starting with its second issue early in February 1925—her old pal Harold Ross’s new venture, The New Yorker, with which she would have an extended on-again, off-again love affair. At first, the stories were essentially sketches fed by her perfect ear for foolish, self-absorbed conversation and her scorn for middle-class hypocrisies. They appealed to the same cast of mind that was responding so clamorously to Sinclair Lewis’s puncturings, in Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), of what H.L. Mencken called the “booboisie.” As time passed, though, her intentions grew more serious, culminating in her longest and best-known story, “Big Blonde,” which won the 1929 O.

Henry Award (Faulkner, Cheever, Updike, Carver, Oates, and Munro were among later winners). “Big Blonde” reveals the desperate life of a fading party girl who’s run out of steam and tries, and fails, to kill herself. It’s convincing in its verisimilitude and deployment of pathos, but finally it comes across as a masterly performance rather than a reverberant vision of life. (Compare it to Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.) It’s also Parker dealing with her own failed suicide attempts—slashed wrists, Veronal (Big Blonde’s drug of choice). Suicide was a constant reality for her. The novel she began was to be called Sonnets in Suicide. One of her most famous poems, “Résumé,” summed things up: Razors pain you; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. Death and suicide are never far from her thoughts—she titled her collections Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, Death and Taxes, and Not So Deep as a Well, the first of them a major best seller in 1926, confirming her fame.

Was her poetry just rhyming badinage dressed up as trenchant, plaintive ruminations on love, loss, and death? Her subjects are serious, but her cleverness undercuts them: there’s almost always a last line, a sardonic zinger, to signal that even if she does care, the more fool she. Even her most famous couplet—“Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses”—bandages a wound, although plenty of men made passes. She was clear about her versifying. “There is poetry and there is not,” she once wrote in The New Yorker, and she knew hers was not. She thought her stories were superior to her poems (she was right), but that wasn’t good enough for her. She never managed to write The Novel (as at that time every writer dreamed of doing). Did Hemingway like her work? Did he like her? (He didn’t, but she didn’t know it. As she was dying, Lillian Hellman had to assure her that he did.) Nor did she have much respect for what she and her second husband, the handsome, possibly gay actor and writer Alan Campbell, whom she married twice, did in Hollywood.

(She liked referring to him publicly as “the wickedest woman in Paris.”) They worked hard at their assignments and raked in the chips, and she was twice nominated for an Oscar (A Star Is Born, 1937; Smash-Up: The Story of A Woman, 1947), but her view of film writing never changed from her verdict about it when she was first venturing out to California: “Why, I could do that with one hand tied behind me and the other on Irving Thalberg’s pulse.” A turning point in Parker’s life came in 1927 when she went to Boston to protest the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. It was her first political action, but it came from deep inside her, and she persisted—infiltrating the prison, getting arrested, marching with other writers like John Dos Passos, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Katherine Anne Porter. They didn’t prevail at this low point in the history of justice in America, but she hadn’t backed down. And as time would show, her actions were not just some outburst of what, decades later, would come to be labeled radical chic.

From then on she was committed to liberal or radical causes. She vigorously supported the Loyalists in Spain, even spending ten days with Alan under the bombs in Madrid and Valencia. She helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Whether she actually joined the Communist Party for a short time remains an unanswered question. Although Hellman claimed she was subpoenaed by HUAC and appeared before the committee, this (like so much else in Hellman’s memoirs) is simply untrue. She was, though, visited by two FBI agents in 1951. When they asked her whether she had ever conspired to overthrow the government, she answered, “Listen, I can’t even get my dog to stay down. Do I look to you like someone who could overthrow the government?” The FBI gave her a pass. In the 1930s she had raised money for the defense of the Scottsboro boys, and she never relaxed her efforts in the field of civil rights: when she died, in 1967, her literary estate was left to Martin Luther King, and then to the NAACP , and her ashes are buried in a memorial garden at the organization’s headquarters in Baltimore. Her emotional life was less consistent.

Men had always been in and out of her life, and she inevitably ended up feeling rejected, betrayed, unwanted. She and Campbell loved each other in their way, but their way seems to have been that of a convenient partnership—he could construct stories, she could come up with convincing dialogue; he flattered and cajoled her out of her anxieties and despairs, she legitimized him in the big world. It might have been different if they had had the child she desperately wanted, but in her forties she miscarried more than once, had a hysterectomy, and that was that. The Campbells tried the rustic life, acquiring an ambitious property near Sid and Laura Perelman in Pennsylvania, but, predictably, that didn’t last. In the early 1940s she went back to Hollywood with modest success—some minor work on Pride of the Yankees, dialogue for Hitchcock’s Saboteur—but it was a far cry from the high-flying (and high-paying) days of the previous decade. Her stories now appeared only sporadically, and no longer were automatically accepted by The New Yorker—some were simply too stridently political.

One magazine editor, she wrote in 1939 in the far-left magazine New Masses, tactfully not naming him, “told me that if I changed my piece to make it in favor of Franco, he would publish it. ’God damn it,’ he said, why can’t you be funny again?’” That editor was Harold Ross. Worst of all, as time went by everybody was dying, and far too young, from her idol Ring Lardner at forty-eight and Benchley at fifty-six to Scott Fitzgerald at forty-four. (“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” she murmured over his coffin at his sparsely attended Hollywood funeral.) Helen, her sister, was gone. Who was left? Edmund Wilson was still around—they had almost had a fling way back in 1919; now he paid occasional painful visits to her at the Volney. (“She lives with a small and nervous bad-smelling poodle bitch, drinks a lot, and does not care to go out.”) She was still devoted to the Golden Couple, Gerald and Sara Murphy. (“There aren’t any people, Mr. Benchley, except you and the Murphys.

I know that now,” she had written to him in 1929.) She had lived with the Murphys in their famous spread on the Riviera, and had spent a good part of a year with them in the Swiss sanitarium to which they moved when their son Patrick contracted tuberculosis. Their lives, however, rarely converged now. Difficult friends like Hellman and recent ones like Gloria Vanderbilt and her husband, Wyatt Cooper, couldn’t take up the slack. She was still revered, a legend, but she had also become a pathetic relic. Yes, “you might as well live,” but for what? And on what? Not only was she running out of old friends, she was running out of money, though uncashed checks, some quite large, were strewn around her apartment (along with the empty bottles), not helping with unpaid bills. By the mid-1950s she was finished with fiction and verse and screenplays, but now she returned to the field in which she had first made a splash and which she had never entirely abandoned: criticism.

We mostly don’t think about this work because it hasn’t been available—until very recently, only her New Yorker book reviews, written between 1927 and 1933, had been collected, and that was in 1970. Her column was called “Constant Reader,” a name immortalized in her review of A.A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner. Pooh, she tells us, is reciting a song to Piglet which begins “The more it snows, tiddely-pom—” “’Tiddely what?’ said Piglet.” (He took, as you might say, the very words out of your correspondent’s mouth.) “’Pom,’ said Pooh. ’I put that in to make it more hummy.’” And it is that word “hummy,” my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up. The thirty-one reprinted reviews range in subject from the ludicrous to the sublime. Predictably, Parker is deadly when dealing with nonsense or pretension.

Her targets include Nan Britton, who wrote a tell-all book about her love affair (and illegitimate baby) with President Warren Harding, the notorious evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, and Emily Post and her Etiquette. (She did not react positively to Mrs. Post’s suggestion that to get a conversation going with a stranger, you might try, “I’m thinking of buying a radio. Which make do you think is best?”) So she’s funny. More impressive is her uncannily astute judgment. She admires Katherine Mansfield, Dashiell Hammett (she loved thrillers almost as much as she loved dogs), Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Hemingway’s short stories (more than his novels), of course Ring Lardner, Gide’s The Counterfeiters—“too tremendous a thing for praises. To say of it ’Here is a magnificent novel’ is rather like gazing into the Grand Canyon and remarking, ’Well, well, well; quite a slice.’” Her most impassioned praise is reserved for Isadora Duncan.

Despite calling it “abominably written,” she characterized Duncan’s posthumous autobiography, My Life, as an enormously interesting and a profoundly moving book. Here was a great woman; a magnificent, generous, gallant, reckless, fated fool of a woman. There was never a place for her in the ranks of the terrible, slow army of the cautious. She ran ahead, where there were no paths. Parker would always rise to the challenges of greatness and of garbage; it was what fell in between that drove her crazy. Last year there appeared a five-hundred-page collection of Parker’s early drama criticism, edited by Kevin Fitzpatrick and titled Complete Broadway, 1918–1923. Except for half a dozen of these pieces that appear in an updated edition of the essential Portable Dorothy Parker, none to my knowledge has ever been reprinted, and yet not only are they wickedly funny and to the point, they unearth for us what Broadway was actually up to in that hyperactive period in the history of the American theater. Her first piece, from April 1918, sets the tone.

It covers the latest musicals and it begins in raptures about the new Wodehouse-Bolton-Kern show, Oh, Lady! Lady!! “Not even the presence in the first-night audience of Mr. William Randolph Hearst, wearing an American flag on his conventional black lapel, could spoil my evening.” Then things go downhill. Girl O’ Mine was “one of those shows at which you can get a lot of knitting done.” And on to The Love Mill and its “two hundred and fifty pounds of comedienne throwing herself into a man’s arms, felling him to the earth.” And finally there’s Sinbad, the latest Al Jolson extravaganza: Of course, I take a certain civic pride in the fact that there is probably more nudity in our own Winter Garden than there is in any other place in the world, nevertheless, there are times during an evening’s entertainment when I pine for 11:15, so that I can go out in the street and see a lot of women with clothes on. Yet even when she yields to her funny bone at the expense of some monstrosity, she finds time to praise.

She may poke fun at a vast and gorgeous spectacle called Mecca— It is comfortable to reflect that it gives congenial and remunerative employment to hundreds, including two exceedingly shabby camels, who, I am willing to wager, although my memory for faces is not infallible, made their debut in the world premiere of Ben Hur… —but she goes on to say “the most important announcement is that Michel Fokine directed the dances, for they are startlingly beautiful.” Who knew that the renowned choreographer of The Firebird, Scheherazade, Petrushka, and Les Sylphides had once worked side by side with camels? It’s all here right at the start of her career—the wit, the fun, the creation of “Dorothy Parker” as a character: she was determined to make a name for herself, and she did. But not at the expense of the worthy. She might deride the endless longueurs of Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, but she’s enthusiastic about his Candida.

She’s in awe at The Hairy Ape: “One is ashamed to place neat little bouquets of praise on this mighty conception of O’Neill’s.” About Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.: “Here is a play stamped all over with the poisonous marks of the lofty-browed…yet it will give you just the same sort of good, homemade thrills that The Bat did.” After apologizing at length for her inability to enjoy Shakespeare on the stage, I am willing to go down to my plot in Woodlawn secure in the conviction that never has there been so fine a Hamlet as John Barrymore’s. He makes the Prince of Elsinore a young and engaging man, gives him flashes of quiet, skillful humor, grips you suddenly with a glimpse of his desperate loneliness…. As to his sanity, you are never in a moment’s doubt. You leave the theatre ready to take the thing to court, if necessary.

And in that same column of February 1923, she gives an equally ardent and convincing account of Jeanne Eagels’s famous performance in the dramatization of Somerset Maugham’s Rain: “Her voice, her intonations, her bursts of hard laughter and flaming fury—great is the least that you can call them.” Parker loves Ethel Barrymore, she loves Laurette Taylor, she loves, sometimes, Sir J.M. (“Never-Grow-Up”) Barrie, she loves George M. Cohan, she’s nuts about scary melodramas. For theater-history buffs, all this is catnip. For Parker-lovers, it’s revelation. Yes, she gets repetitious, repeats some gags, stumbles, but in the face of Broadway 1918 to 1923, wouldn’t you? Theater critics are trapped by opening-night schedules. Book critics can be more elastic—if they’re lucky, they can pick and choose. In December 1957 Parker began writing a monthly book column for Esquire—monthly in name only, since getting copy out of her was anguish for the editors.

(According to her biographer Marion Meade, the magazine’s formidable publisher, Arnold Gingrich, viewed his job with her as “obstetrics, and often referred to the monthly operation as a ‘high-forceps delivery.’”) For almost five years her column was an ornament to Esquire. She announced her standards in her first article, a round-up of the year’s best fiction: William Faulkner is “the greatest writer we have,” and she characterizes 1957 as “the year in which The Town appeared.” She then obliterates James Gould Cozzens’s By Love Possessed—“cold, distant, and exasperatingly patronizing”—anticipating by several weeks Dwight Macdonald’s famously savage assault in Commentary. She highly recommends Cheever’s The Wapshot Chronicle, Sybille Bedford’s “almost terrifyingly brilliant” A Legacy, Nabokov’s Pnin, and Brian Moore’s The Feast of Lupercal.

(Among the books she nixes is Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, which “must have been written while he was waiting for the lift to reach his floor.”) And she doles out Yeses and Nos and Maybes to a host of others. She had done her work, and then some. Some of the columns are workaday, but many are stellar—not only for the acuity of her judgments (“Lolita is a fine book, a distinguished book—all right, then—a great book”) but for the pleasure of her writing. Because these Esquire pieces have never been reprinted, I will indulge myself with some extensive quotation. About Sheilah Graham’s tell-all Beloved Infidel: Graham lets it be known that of course she felt something awful after [her lover Scott Fitzgerald] died, but of course she had to go on living, and so she married and had two children—quite big children it seems, for they were old enough to hear about Scott Fitzgerald, and they asked Mommie if they weren’t related to Mr. Fitzgerald, and Mommie said yes, darlings, in a way you are. I present this as the possible all-time low in American letters.

About the divine Zsa Zsa: It will be a black day in these grubby diggings when some stony-eyed precisionist shall enter, uninvited, and explain to me that there really is a Zsa Zsa Gabor. To me, the lady is a figment of mythology. In my mind, she is one with the unicorn, all shining white and gold, forever swift and lovely, immortal because fabulous. It is a simple belief, and harms no one. So it is a pleasure to me to set down here that even after a careful reading of Zsa Zsa Gabor: My Story Written for Me by Gerold Frank my faith is still unshattered, and Miss Gabor keeps her place in the land of faerie. And in a review of James Thurber’s The Years with Ross, she draws a heartfelt portrait of her old colleague and friend, their political differences long behind her: His improbabilities started with his looks. His long body seemed to be only basted together, his hair was quills upon the fretful porcupine, his teeth were Stonehenge, his clothes looked as if they had been brought up by somebody else. Poker-faced he was not.

Expressions, sometimes several at a time, would race across his countenance, and always, especially when he thought no one was looking, not the brow alone but the whole expanse would be corrugated by his worries over his bitch-mistress, his magazine. This is Parker prose at its absolute finest—and another example of how her take on things is almost inevitably personal rather than analytical. The saddest and most telling moment in her five-year run at Esquire comes at the very end of a discussion of a book about James McNeill Whistler and his circle. She is writing this in 1960, and she is sixty-six. She talks of Whistler, Rossetti, Swinburne, Wilde. “There were giants in those days,” she remarks. “And fools talk about the round table at the Algonquin!” Dorothy Parker was too smart to buy the legend and too clearheaded to slide into nostalgia. That left her having to acknowledge some bitter realities. If only she hadn’t won celebrity so early and so easily. If only she had been blessed with Hemingway’s talent, had written her novel (and it had been any good), hadn’t succumbed to the easy life and money of Hollywood.

If only she had married Mr. Right instead of lumbering herself with all those Mr. Wrongs. If she had had that baby… She was too sensible to live in regret, but she certainly understood how much of her life she had spent carousing and just fooling around. The tragedy of Dorothy Parker, it seems to me, isn’t that she succumbed to alcoholism or died essentially alone. It was that she was too intelligent to believe that she had made the most of herself. Dorothy Parker - Poet | Academy of American Poets Academy of American Poets The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization. browse poems & poets poet Dorothy Parker On August 22, 1893, Dorothy Parker was born to J.

Henry and Elizabeth Rothschild, at their summer home in West End, New Jersey. Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, her childhood was an unhappy one. Both her mother and step-mother died when she was young; her uncle, Martin Rothschild, went down on the Titanic in 1912; and her father died the following year. Young Dorothy attended a Catholic grammar school, then a finishing school in Morristown, NJ. Her formal education abruptly ended when she was 14. In 1914, Dorothy sold her first poem to Vanity Fair. At age 22, she took an editorial job at Vogue. She continued to write poems for newspapers and magazines, and in 1917 she joined Vanity Fair, taking over for P.G. Wodehouse as drama critic. That same year she married a stockbroker, Edwin P. Parker. But the marriage was tempestuous, and the couple divorced in 1928. In 1919, Parker became a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, an informal gathering of writers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel.

The "Vicious Circle" included Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, George S Kaufman, and Edna Ferber, and was known for its scathing wit and intellectual commentary. In 1922, Parker published her first short story, "Such a Pretty Little Picture," for Smart Set. When the New Yorker debuted in 1925, Parker was listed on the editorial board. Over the years, she contributed poetry, fiction and book reviews as the "Constant Reader." Parker’s first collection of poetry, Enough Rope, was published in 1926, and was a bestseller. Her two subsequent collections were Sunset Gun in 1928 and Death and Taxes in 1931. Her collected fiction came out in 1930 as Laments for the Living. During the 1920s, Parker traveled to Europe several times. She befriended Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, socialites Gerald and Sarah Murphy, and contributed articles to the New Yorker and Life. While her work was successful and she was well-regarded for her wit and conversational abilities, she suffered from depression and alcoholism and attempted suicide.

In 1929, she won the O. Henry Award for her autobiographical short story "Big Blonde." She produced short fiction in the early 1930s, and also began writing drama reviews for the New Yorker. In 1934, Parker married actor-writer Alan Campbell in New Mexico; the couple relocated to Los Angeles and became a highly paid screenwriting team. They labored for MGM and Paramount on mostly forgettable features, the highlight being an Academy Award nomination for A Star Is Born in 1937. They divorced in 1947, and remarried in 1950. Parker, who became a socialist in 1927 when she became involved in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, was called before the House on Un-American Activities in 1955. She pleaded the Fifth Amendment. Parker was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959 and was a visiting professor at California State College in Los Angeles in 1963. That same year, her husband died of an overdose.

On June 6, 1967, Parker was found dead of a heart attack in a New York City hotel at age 73. A firm believer in civil rights, she bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Upon his assassination some months later, the estate was turned over to the NAACP. A Selected Bibliography Jewcy.com | Her Maiden Name was Dorothy Rothschild Posts Her Maiden Name was Dorothy Rothschild If you’re a certain type of bitter, intellectual female, you like Dorothy Parker. The smart-ass 20's writer is an all ages tonic- consoling you through bad love affairs and high-school unpopularity. Originally born Dorothy Rothschild (not those Rothschilds!), Dottie claimed … Read More PRINT ARTICLE Jewcy loves trees! Please don't print! If you’re a certain type of bitter, intellectual female, you like Dorothy Parker. The smart-ass 20's writer is an all ages tonic- consoling you through bad love affairs and high-school unpopularity. Originally born Dorothy Rothschild (not those Rothschilds!), Dottie claimed to have married just to acquire a waspy last name. Without ever offing herself, she made suicide stylish way before Kurt Cobain.

So, imagine my glee when I discovered there was a whole society devoted to resurrecting Dorothy Parker. The Dorothy Parker Society throws drunken parties throughout the year, including the Gin Bowl and Parkerfest! I met president Kevin Fitzpatrick at the NY Comiccon, where he won my heart on his choice of convention sketch. Instead of topless WonderWoman, he wanted St. Dottie in a suit. The Society is also working on returning Dorothy's ashes from Baltimore to New York City. Who wants the provinces as their eternal resting place? Check out the Dottie Parker Society at . And, if attending their parties, remember that, even in the 1920’s, Alexander Wolcott got booted for vomiting in the Ming vase. Dorothy Parker - New World Encyclopedia Dorothy Parker New York , New York Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American writer, poet, critic, and influential feminist . Her reputation is legendary, and she is known today as one of the most brilliant writers in American history. Her thoughts and ideas, presented in her characteristic style of illustrating human nature with caustic wit, revolutionized the way many people thought, especially women.

Her humor is sometimes cruel, sometimes truthful, but always sarcastic. Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Roumania. Contents 10 Credits Dorothy Parker, known to many as Dot or Dottie, had one of the most successful writing careers of any woman of her time. She served as a writer and editor for both Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines, along with writing many successful screenplays and television programs. She also published several articles in The New Yorker and had her own newspaper column called Constant Reader. Even with this success she suffered from severe depression and self criticism. Dorothy Parker is perhaps most recognized as one of the founders of the famous Algonquin Round Table group. Early life Dorothy Rothschild, (Dot or 'Dottie), was the fourth and final child born to Jacob Henry and Annie Eliza (Marston) Rothschild. The family had an apartment in Manhattan and a summer house in the West End district of Long Branch, New Jersey .

Dorothy spent her first few weeks of life in the summer home, but claimed that her parents brought her back to the city right after Labor Day , so she could claim to be a true New Yorker. The Rothchild family was not part of the famous Rothschilds' banking dynasty. Her father worked as a garment manufacturer and the small family was happy and content for the next four years, living on the Upper West Side. On July 20, 1898, Annie died suddenly, leaving behind the four children and a single father to care for them. Jacob was remarried two years later to Eleanor Francis Lewis. However, tragedy struck again when Eleanor died just three short years later from a heart-attack. Although Dorothy never particularly warmed to her stepmother in the short three years, it still caused a deep sense of sadness to be motherless once again. The children all suffered from these losses, as well as Jacob, himself. Dorothy was sent to Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament. Many see this as an odd choice considering that her father was Jewish and her stepmother was Protestant . The school was harsh and she claims she never learned anything and felt guilt about everything.

Dorothy went on to attend Miss Dana's School, a finishing school in Morristown, New Jersey. During these years, Dorothy was not encouraged to share her feelings, thus keeping them bottled up inside. This is thought to be one of the causes for her later episodes of depression. Her graduation from finishing school at 13 ended her formal education. To add to this sad childhood, Dorothy's brother was a passenger on the RMS Titanic and was killed when the ship sank in 1912. The tragedies continued when her father died on December 28, 1913. Dorothy suffered from the effects of all of these deaths, often finding it hard to form solid bonds with people. These events also played a role in her battle with alcoholism. Writing Career Dorothy Parker felt ill prepared for the world of Manhattan that awaited her upon the completion of her limited schooling. Thus, she began earning money by playing piano at a local dancing school, along with other sporadic music jobs. In 1914 she sold her first poem to Vanity Fair, but her big break came in 1916, when Parker started submitting various poems to the editor of another Condé Nast magazine, Vogue.

The editor was so impressed with young Dorothy's writings that a job was immediately offered to her. Dorothy worked as an editorial assistant at Vogue for the next year. In 1917 Dorothy met and married Edwin Pond Parker II, a stockbroker. Dorothy was only too happy to marry and rid herself of the Rothchild name. She dealt with strong feelings about her Jewish heritage, most of them negative because of the raging anti-Semitism of the time. She said that she married to escape her name. However, the marriage did not last long. The couple was separated when Edwin Parker was sent to fight during World War I . Edwin was seriously injured after only a few months of service. This injury, along with the pains and memories of the war, led Edwin to a life long addiction to alcohol and morphine. The relationship was not a positive one, and it ended in divorce in 1919. But Dorothy would never revert back to her maiden name. She kept the last name of Parker for the rest of her life, even when she married again. When she was asked if there was a Mr.

Parker, she casually responded: "There used to be." Dorothy transfered over to Vanity Fair in 1917, where she served as a drama critic and staff writer until 1920. Her critiques made her a household name and she developed a large readership. She initially took the position as a stand-in for the author P.G. Woodhouse while he was on vacation. But the rise of her popularity convinced the magazine to retain her in her own right as a writer, once Woodhouse had returned. The managing editor, Frank Crowinshield, stated in an interview that Dorothy Parker had "the quickest tongue imaginable, and I need not to say the keenest sense of mockery." And in the introduction to Parker's Collected Stories, Regina Barreca wrote that, "Parker's wit caricatures the self-deluded, the powerful, the autocratic, the vain, the silly, and the self important; it does not rely on men and small formulas, and it never ridicules the marginalized, the sidelined or the outcast.

When Parker goes for the jugular, its usually a vein with blueblood in it." In 1920, it would be this satirical wit and mocking caricatures that would lead to her termination from Vanity Fair. They claimed that she had offended too many people throughout her reviews. The Round Table years While at Vanity Fair, Dorothy Parker made friends with other writers and these relationships would change her life. Among them was Robert Benchley , who can be said to be her best friend, as well as Robert E. Sherwood. The three writers began taking their daily lunch together at the Algonquin Hotel, located on Forty-Fourth street. These lunches were not merely for eating. They were for sharing ideas, giving critiques of writing, lavishing encouragement and praise upon one another, and sincerely sharing their deepest ideas mixed with their best jokes and a cocktail. They became the founding members of the famous intellectual group, the Algonquin Round Table. As tales of these lunches grew, so did the members. Soon Parker, Benchley and Sherwood were joined by Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. These men were successful newspaper columnists.

Once they became acquainted with the genius who was Dorothy Parker, they became adamant in publicizing her witticisms. Other members, like Harold Ross , would filter in and out of the group over the years. However, Dorothy Parker remained the only woman in the group. She could hold her own when defending her sex, sharing her ideas, and maintaining the respect of every man admitted into the Round Table's elite group. It was during the Round Table years that Dorothy was fired from Vanity Fair. To show their support for her writing, and to validate the injustice that was done to Parker, both Benchley and Sherwood resigned in protest in 1920. During the next few years, Dorothy worked heavily on her poetry and also was hired on as a staff member of a new magazine, The New Yorker. The magazine, founded by fellow Round Table member Harold Ross , gave both Benchley and Parker freedom to write and cultivate their own projects and dictate their own hours. Parker did not write much for The New Yorker until after 1926, when her first collection of poems, Enough Rope was published. The poetry collection was full of rhymes and creative meter, along with lively words, but the topics were much more serious and often vicious.

Among this group of poems is perhaps one of Parker's most famous, Résumé. Résumé Gas smell awful; You might as well live. Parker's poetry found instant success. Readers loved her perceptions of her romantic affairs, many of which were unsuccessful, and her honesty about her suicide thoughts and attempts. She became a part of pop-culture when she turned up in a famous Cole Porter song, Just One Of Those Things, ("As Dorothy Parker once said/ To her boyfriend: 'Fare thee well!.") Parker continued to write over the next 15 years, doing little else with her time. She wrote everything from poetry to short stories, from screenplays to television scripts, and even co-authored a few plays. Her publications came in seven volumes: Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, Laments for the Living, Death and Taxes, After Such Pleasures, Not So Deep as a Well (collected poems), and Here Lies. The famous critic, Brendan Gill, noted that the titles of her collection "amounted to a capsule autobiography." Many highlights from this time period were originally published in The New Yorker, including her famous column "Constant Reader," which were very acerbic book reviews.

Unlike Vanity Fair, The New Yorker loved her satire and witty cruelty. Her column became extremely popular and was later published in a collection under the same name. With all of these amazing credits to her name, her best-known story remains, "A Big Blonde" published in Bookman Magazine and awarded the O. Henry Award as the most outstanding short story of 1929. Her short stories were sparse and incisive, relying heavily on dialog rather than description. She attributed this characteristic to her love of Ernest Hemingway . They were witty, but in a bittersweet, rather than comedic, sense. Her life during the 1920s was full of extra-marital affairs, a heavy reliance on alcohol, and a desire for death (she attempted suicide three times during the decade). Her most noted affairs were with reporter-turned-playwright Charles MacArthur, F. Scott Fitzgerald , and with the publisher Seward Collins. Hollywood and later life After the tumultuous 1920s in New York , Dorothy Parker desired a change of pace. In 1934, she married Alan Campbell, an actor with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. The couple moved to Hollywood to pursue careers in the movie business.

Campbell had a great desire to act, but he also wanted to contribute to the screen through writing. However, it was Dorothy Parker who shined in this respect. She was the one in the relationship who made the living. She had a natural gift for the work and became quite wealthy (making a salary of $5200 a week) during the the Depression. Upon the move to Hollywood, Parker was contracted as a freelance writer for several Hollywood film studios. In all, the couple, who often worked together on projects, wrote for more than 15 films. Parker and Campbell joined forces with Robert Carson in 1937 to write the script to the film A Star is Born. The film was directed by William Wellman and starred Janet Gaynor, Fredric March, and Adolphe Menjou. The film was a major success and nominated for several Academy Awards including Best Writing-Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor and others. It received an Oscar for Best Original Story. She followed up this success with her collaboration with Peter Vierter and Joan Harrison in Alfred Hitchcock 's film Saboteur (1940).

Many of Parker's fans could see clearly her quirky additions and contributions to the script. However, when the final project was finished, she claimed that her cameo with Hitchcock was the only interesting part and that the rest of the film was terribly boring. In addition to her screenplay career, Parker also founded the Screen Writer's Guild with Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett . She never seemed to tire as she also reported on the Spanish Civil War and in her spare time worked on several plays, although none of them ever became popular. In spite of all of Parker's and Campbells's success, their marriage was a struggle. The couple would often fight and separate, only to reconcile a few weeks later. Eventually, they divorced in 1947, but even this did not last and society was a bit amused when they remarried in 1950. They stayed married until Campbell's death in 1963. Dorothy Parker was an outspoken advocate of left-wing causes. Her passion for civil rights was received with harsh criticism and commentary from those who were in authority. As her time in Hollywood lengthened, she became more involved in politics. Parker supported the American Communist Party in 1934.

She wrote for the Loyalist cause in Spain for the Communist paper New Masses in 1937, and was one of the founders of the Anti-Nazi League in Hollywood. Many friends thought her behavior too radical, and it caused rifts between Parker and those who used to be close to her. She rarely saw her former Round Table friends. The growth of the American Communist Party led to investigations by the FBI and Dorothy Parker was on their list. The McCarthy era, as this period of time was known, resulted in Parker and others being placed on the Hollywood blacklist by movie studio bosses. Her dependence on alcohol began to interfere with her work from 1957 to 1962. Although she wrote a few book reviews for Esquire, her position was not guaranteed, and her erratic behavior and lack of interest in deadlines, caused her popularity among editors to decline. In 1967, Dorothy Parker died of a heart attack at the age of 73 in Volney Apartments in New York City . Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including a file cabinet for 21 years. The NAACP eventually claimed them and built a memorial garden for them in their Baltimore headquarters.

The plaque reads: Here lie the ashes of Dorthy Parker (1893 - 1967) humorist, writer, critic. Defender of human and civil rights. For her epitaph she suggested, 'Excuse my dust'. This memorial garden is dedicated to her noble spirit which celebrated the oneness of humankind and to the bonds of everlasting friendship between black and Jewish people. Dedicated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. October 28, 1988. When Parker died, she did something completely unexpected, but not surprising; she bequeathed her entire estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. foundation. Following King's death, her estate was passed on to the NAACP. Her executor, Lillian Hellman , bitterly but unsuccessfully contested this disposition. Even in death, Parker found a way to support a cause she deeply believed in. In popular culture George Oppenheimer wrote a play during the height of Dorothy Parker's popularity.

In his play, Here Today (1932), Ruth Gordon played the character based on Parker Parker's life was the subject of the 1987 video Dorothy And Alan At Norma Place, and the 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle in which she was played by Jennifer Jason Leigh; others in the cast were Campbell Scott, Matthew Broderick, and Peter Gallagher. On August 22, 1992 (Parker's 99th birthday), her image appeared on a 29¢ U.S. commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series. Dorothy Parker's small star tattoo on the inside of her arm was the inspiration for a compendium of literary extracts about tattoos, Dorothy Parker's Elbow - Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos by Kim Addonizio and Cheryl Dumesnil. Dorothy Parker, along with other figures of the era such as Ira Gershwin and George Gershwin , is featured as a character in Act 1, Scene 12 of the stage musical version of Thoroughly Modern Millie. Publications 1971. A Month of Saturdays 1996.

Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker Movies Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle IMDB Sources Addonizio, Kim, and Cheryl Dumesnil (eds.). 2002. Dorothy Parker's Elbow - Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. New York: Warner Books. ISBN 0446679046 Fitzpatrick, Kevin C. 2005. A Journey into Dorothy Parker's New York. Berkeley, CA: Roaring Forties Press. ISBN 0976670607 Keats, John. 1970. You Might As Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0671206605 Meade, Marion. 1988. Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell is This? New York: Villard. ISBN 0140116168 Meade, Marion. 2006. The Portable Dorothy Parker. Penguin Classic.

ISBN 0143039539 External links Dorothy Parker - Biography - IMDb Dorothy Parker Biography Showing all 48 items Jump to: Overview (5) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (3) | Trade Mark (1) | Trivia (13) | Personal Quotes (25) Overview (5) 4' 11" (1.5 m) Mini Bio (1) Dorothy Rothschild was born on August 22, 1893 into a family of comfortable financial means. Raised by her father and Stepmother after her mother's death, she was given an excellent education for the times. Highly intelligent, she pursued a career after her formal education and proved herself to be one of the early feminists. She started writing poems early and her witty remarks are still alive today. In 1917 she was asked to join the staff at Vanity Fair magazine and to marry Edward Pond Parker II, both of which she agreed to gladly. Eddie Parker soon was stationed overseas and Dorothy became one of the founding members of the Algonquin Hotel "Round Table".

Eddie arrived back from the war with an unfortunate drinking problem, and Dorothy decided she loved her new life more than she did him. They were separated far more than together and divorced in 1928. She spent a very dramatic period of time in New York City, doing theater reviews, spending time with her Algonquin friends, drinking far too much. She published poems and short stories and in 1929 won the national O. Henry Prize for the short story "Big Blonde". This established her as a serious writer. She married Alan Campbell when she was forty and he was twenty-nine. He encouraged her to go Hollywood where they became a very successful screenwriting team. Beginning in 1933 they received screen credits for fifteen films, most notably A Star Is Born (1937) which was nominated for an Academy Award. The time spent in Hollywood were the most lucrative years of her career, yet she spent every dime of it. She divorced and remarried Alan Campbell and in 1963 he died. She spent her last years in New York City, in very poor health due to heavy drinking and making do on very little money.

Often, she would have to call on friends like Lillian Hellman to help her financially. Dorothy Parker died in 1967 at seventy-three years old in her New York hotel room, all alone. Time magazine devoted an entire page to her obituary, which was considered an amazing tribute. Her estate was left in full to Martin Luther King and the NAACP. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Sheryl Reeder<sherry@reeder.com Spouse (3) Sharp, sardonic wit Trivia (13) Left most of her estate to Martin Luther King . Left her ashes to Lillian Hellman who never claimed them. At a low point in her finances, a friend interceded with John Gilbert , who graciously sent $2,000. Then, when his career was on the wane, he inquired if it might be possible to collect on some of the loans he'd made. Dorothy sent a check and in return received red roses with a note, "Thank you, Miss Finland" (Finland was the only country that had paid its war debt to the U.S. after World War I).

After her death, some of her ashes were scattered at a specially designed memorial garden at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Attempted suicide many times during her life. Pictured on a 29¢ US commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series, issued 22 August 1992. Dorothy's uncle, Martin Rothschild, and his wife Lizzie, were aboard the Titanic in 1912. Lizzie survived, but Martin Rothschild did not. Martin's death was particularly hard for Dorothy's father, Henry Rothschild, and he died shortly thereafter in 1913. In 1922 she had an affair with the emerging playwright Charles MacArthur , who it turned out was having multiple affairs with other women. Subject of the song "Be My Dorothy Parker" by The Shots of Perspective. She is nominated for the 2008 New Jersey Hall of Fame for her services and contributions to literature. Profiled in book "Funny Ladies" by Stephen M. Silverman . [1999] She was nominated for the 2012 New Jersey Hall of Fame for her contributions in the General Category.

She was nominated for a 2013 New Jersey Hall of Fame in the General Category. She was inducted into the 2014 New Jersey Hall of Fame in the Arts and Letters Category. Personal Quotes (25) Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses. Once in her long-running feud with Clare Boothe Luce , Mrs. Luce held the door open for Mrs. Parker to walk through and said, "Age before beauty." Mrs. Parker walked through and said, "Pearls before swine." Another time, when told that Mrs. Luce was kind to her inferiors, she said, "And where does she find them?" If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end-to-end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. Reviewing Katharine Hepburn on Broadway: "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." The only '-ism' Hollywood believes in is plagiarism. After George Oppenheimer and Ruth Gordon each wrote plays with characters based on Mrs. Parker in them, she wrote, "I wanted to write my autobiography, but now I'm afraid to. George Oppenheimer and Ruth Gordon would sue me for plagiarism." Time wounds all heels.

I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money. Sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion. (In 1955) "Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are." The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant, and let the air out of the tires. One more drink and I'll be under the the table, two more drinks and I'll be under the host. Brevity is the soul of lingerie. Scratch an actor - and you'll find an actress. Upon being told that former US President Calvin Coolidge (known as "Silent Cal" for being very tight-lipped) had died, she quipped, "How can they tell?" He and I had an office so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery. Excuse me, I have to use the toilet. Actually, I have to use the telephone, but I'm too embarrassed to say so. Hollywood money isn't money. It's congealed snow.

[on Basil Rathbone ] Two profiles pasted together. People ought to be one of two things, young or dead. On truth: Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. [on children] The best way to keep children at home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant--and let the air out of the tires. [on actress Marion Davies] She has two expressions: joy and indigestion. [on actress Dame Edith Evans] To me, Edith looks like something that would eat its young. I like to have a martini/Two at the very most/After three I'm under the table/After four I'm under my host. See also The Passionate Freudian to His Love - Poems | Academy of American Poets Academy of American Poets The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events.

Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization. browse poems & poets sign up to receive a new poem-a-day in your inbox sign up poem About this poet On August 22, 1893, Dorothy Parker was born to J. Henry and Elizabeth Rothschild, at their summer home in West End, New Jersey. Growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, her childhood was an unhappy one. Both her mother and step-mother died when she was young; her uncle, Martin Rothschild, went down on the Titanic in 1912; and her father died the following year. Young Dorothy attended a Catholic grammar school, then a finishing school in Morristown, NJ. Her formal education abruptly ended when she was 14. In 1914, Dorothy sold her first poem to Vanity Fair. At age 22, she took an editorial job at Vogue. She continued to write poems for newspapers and magazines, and in 1917 she joined Vanity Fair, taking over for P.G. Wodehouse as drama critic. That same year she married a stockbroker, Edwin P. Parker.

But the marriage was tempestuous, and the couple divorced in 1928. In 1919, Parker became a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, an informal gathering of writers who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel. The "Vicious Circle" included Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, George S Kaufman, and Edna Ferber, and was known for its scathing wit and intellectual commentary. In 1922, Parker published her first short story, "Such a Pretty Little Picture," for Smart Set. When the New Yorker debuted in 1925, Parker was listed on the editorial board. Over the years, she contributed poetry, fiction and book reviews as the "Constant Reader." Parker’s first collection of poetry, Enough Rope, was published in 1926, and was a bestseller. Her two subsequent collections were Sunset Gun in 1928 and Death and Taxes in 1931. Her collected fiction came out in 1930 as Laments for the Living. During the 1920s, Parker traveled to Europe several times. She befriended Ernest Hemingway, F.

Scott Fitzgerald, socialites Gerald and Sarah Murphy, and contributed articles to the New Yorker and Life. While her work was successful and she was well-regarded for her wit and conversational abilities, she suffered from depression and alcoholism and attempted suicide. In 1929, she won the O. Henry Award for her autobiographical short story "Big Blonde." She produced short fiction in the early 1930s, and also began writing drama reviews for the New Yorker. In 1934, Parker married actor-writer Alan Campbell in New Mexico; the couple relocated to Los Angeles and became a highly paid screenwriting team. They labored for MGM and Paramount on mostly forgettable features, the highlight being an Academy Award nomination for A Star Is Born in 1937. They divorced in 1947, and remarried in 1950. Parker, who became a socialist in 1927 when she became involved in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial, was called before the House on Un-American Activities in 1955. She pleaded the Fifth Amendment.

Parker was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1959 and was a visiting professor at California State College in Los Angeles in 1963. That same year, her husband died of an overdose. On June 6, 1967, Parker was found dead of a heart attack in a New York City hotel at age 73. A firm believer in civil rights, she bequeathed her literary estate to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Upon his assassination some months later, the estate was turned over to the NAACP. A Selected Bibliography

Question: What was Dorothy Parker's maiden name?
Answer: Rothschild